Note: This article was originally published in The Technology Source (http://ts.mivu.org/) as: Glenn Ralston "The Ten Year Mindset" The Technology Source, July 1998. Available online at http://ts.mivu.org/default.asp?show=article&id=1034. The article is reprinted here with permission of the publisher.

But Neal is not breaking new ground here. He has selected a portion of the educational
landscape where the plow, however deep or sharp, appears to be turning over tired,
worn-out material of dubious origin.

Neal states:

...in the 1960s, instructional
television promised to change teaching and learning dramatically. College administrators
and state legislators, hoping to 'expand educational opportunity' (and ultimately save
money) by using this electronic delivery system, invested millions in closed-circuit
systems, TV production facilities, educational television stations, and even airborne
broadcasting systems....Instructional television failed to achieve the transformation
of higher education [emphasis added].

Hopefully, we did indeed learn from
those mistakes, especially over the past ten years of robust computer-centered media
development. Unfortunately, many have not learned, and remain in that mindset of ten years
back or more.

Neal continues:

...we cannot ignore the enormous
costs of the technology in this equation [emphasis added]. If [Schutte] had used
these methods in his traditional class, costs would not have increased, but because he and
his students needed the networked technology of a major educational institution, they
incurred the extremely high costs of technology.

In his equation of unnecessary and
expensive upgrading with many highly paid experts, Neal has stacked the deck with the
outdated, costly assumptions that remain frozen from ten or more years ago.

What ifin the real worldyou
acquired a PC at the same cost today as you did one 1,000 times less powerful 10 years
ago, and then in another ten years acquired one 1,000 times more powerful than your
present one, also at the same cost? That is an increase in power of one million times, at
the same cost, over just 20 years.

And that's just the hardware. The
greatest value by far is in the power of the software in the hands of the individual. Each
individual student or professor already has cheap or free access to all the benefits of
more than $6 billion previously spent on applied research and development of personal
software tools.

Todaynot ten years agothe
newest media configurations of the World Wide Web are powerful, inexpensive, highly
interactive, individually controlled for self-pacing, ideally suited for independent
learning, and ultimately empowering to the user. Technology has already swept over us. It
is no longer a technological argument, but rather a cultural change. Not requiring these
abundant advantages now is to be fiscally unsound.

Finally, Neal also reports:

Actually, students in the virtual class
experienced a completely different method of teaching from those in the traditional class.
Not only did they have more opportunities to be involved with each other and with the
teacher, but (very significantly) they were intensively engaged with the course
material [emphasis added] over the entire week.

Here, Neal acknowledges that the
resulting performance of the virtual class is 20% higher than the traditional group, but
seems to malign the idea that the virtual class had more opportunity. And who is to say
what is a "real classroom"? Labeling a conceptas some doas a
"real classroom" if it has tables, chairs, chalkboard, walls, a door, etc. seems
merely pompous.

My simple disagreement with Neal is that this depiction of that straw manand
now a mindsethas not existed for ten years, and we won't see the likes again.